A curriculum review: Evaluating if the HYMS MBBS curriculum is designed to deliver on national guidance for general practice teaching

THE PROBLEM

The Wass report summarised why General Practice matters, and so why we must pay attention to recruitment, training, and retention of GPs at all career stages. There is particular emphasis on the roles and responsibilities of all medical schools to address the issues at the root of this problem. What is also apparent both within General Practice and more widely is a loss of ‘generalist’ skills in medicine.

HYMS vision is to be Exceptional, Innovative, Visionary and Pioneering, which needs to be reflected in our curriculum. To continue to support current and future workforce development, we need to ensure that we prepare our students for general practice and educate them about medical generalism.

YOUR APPROACH

We have designed a two-stage approach to evaluate our curriculum.  Stage one involved analysis of key national and international documents and produced a set of codes organised into a framework based upon core themes. We compared each written learning objective against our novel framework and so generated a map of general practice teaching across all 5 years of study in the MBBS programme.

THE LEARNING

Stage one highlighted areas of teaching strongly represented in the formal curriculum, including person centred care, communication skills and reflective practice. It also identified areas with possible room for improvement such as the hidden curriculum, generalist medicine and methods of delivery. This mapping has enabled us to focus on areas of the curriculum which appear under-developed for our ongoing evaluation. We are now in the process of stage two, where we are engaging students and tutors in semi-structured interviews. The data from these interviews is being analysed using a modified framework approach.

WHY IT MATTERS

All medical schools and clinicians involved in education have a responsibility to address the issues affecting General Practice recruitment. Our methods so far may be transferrable to other schools and will be of interest to anyone who wishes to explore this issue further.

Presenting author: Dr James Bennett, Academy of Primary Care, HYMS. James.bennett2@hyms.ac.uk
 

Co-authors:

Sarah Habib, 5th Year Medical Student, HYMS, sarah.habib@hyms.ac.uk 

Prof. Joanne Reeve, Academy of Primary Care, HYMS, joanne.reeve@hyms.ac.uk

Dr Puja Verma, Academy of Primary Care, HYMS, puja.verma@hyms.ac.uk